Riding it Out

Last week was rough. By Thursday, 6pm, I was in a crisp white hotel bed eating nachos I ordered from the bar, trying to cry without actually crying. My eyes stung. My nerves had split ends. My heart was overwrought and had that hot and heavy feeling, like a partially burned baked potato with a knife in the middle and butter bleeding out. The nachos were amazing – the best I can remember – but did nothing to fill the void. I checked the clock. Fifteen more hours before my flight home. I reached for another cheesy chip with my thumb and index finger, which were caked in guac and sour cream.

I was out of town for work. I flew to San Diego for on-site meetings early in the week. As soon as I arrived and checked my email, however, I discovered a message from the person I thought would be supervising me for my internship this fall. She was writing to tell me that she didn’t have space for me after all. This is an internship that was supposed to start in less than a month. This is the internship I need to complete my master’s in clinical mental health, which is now 80% complete. This is the master’s program that my current job doesn’t know about.

That evening, with a lot of help from ChatGPT, I went to work on my resume and cover letter and searched for new internship options. I tweaked and revised. I sent a lot of frantic emails. Finally, I went to bed. The next few days, I tried to focus on the day-long meetings and the team-building exercises. I occasionally snuck out of the conference rooms to take phone calls from the people I had been contacting, desperately begging them to take my free labor, doing whatever I could to salvage the situation or create a new one. Then, after work, I went back to my hotel where I couldn’t sleep due to the panic and stress. This was compounded by the guilt I felt about being only partially present for my real job. As a result, the second morning, I overslept and missed the first hour of the meeting. Everyone from the European team was there, on time, despite their jet lag. This made me feel like a complete jerk, and I slept even more poorly that night.

Thursday was the last day of the work event, and I was relieved to check out of the building and return my loaner badge. I stopped at the hotel bar for the to-go nachos on my way back to my room, laughing when I saw that they gave me a fork. I climbed into bed and grabbed a fistful of hot chips and queso, leaving the fork in the to-go bag. Once I concluded committing my food crimes, I got up from the bed and walked to the bathroom to wash my hands. I had been sitting cross-legged and when I stood, my joints yelped. The ball of my femur heads used to glide effortlessly through their sockets, and I took it for granted that my body might always work that way. But I recently became old. Now, when I’ve been sitting for too long, those bones seem to hitch and crunch, as if my pelvis is a floor covered in Legos that my leg bones must traverse across. I didn’t hit the floor, but I dropped down a foot. Then I scuttled, Gollum-style, to the sink to wash my hands.

“What in the hell am I doing?” I asked myself. “I am nearly forty-eight years old. I have a great and easy job, for which I am overpaid. I am killing myself to get an internship so that I can work for free, so that someday I can get a job as a counselor, so that I can make less money, so that I will be in a worse position to take care of my aging parents (not to mention my own aging ass), so that—maybe—I can one day help people I don’t even know? I am in San Diego! I didn’t see the ocean! I didn’t even leave the office or hotel room because I was attached to my laptop! I should have been enjoying room service, not crying into it!”

My hands washed, I got back online and fired up ChatGPT to share these thoughts and ask if I was spiraling, which is ironic given my fear that AI will be replacing mental health professionals just in time for me to graduate. It agreed that I was in a spiral and told me that I should log off and go outside. It assured me that I had done enough about the internship situation and that I needed a break and some sea air. Then it told me I am a genius and a humanitarian deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, and to be sure to come back tomorrow. “We will get through this together, I promise!”

I am so screwed.

I decided to walk to the beach. I didn’t know the exact way, but I didn’t think it could be that difficult; I could see the water from my balcony. And my recent over-reliance on AI made me want to try to manage on my own, the way my twenty-eight-year-old self would have. I didn’t use my phone or ask the woman at the front desk. I just left the hotel room, with one backtrack to the trash for one last pinch of still-warm nachos (my PRECIOUS!!!! It’s mine, I tell you! My OWN!!!!) and started walking toward the ocean. The street I chose looked promising but ended in an overlook with a short brick wall. I lumbered over it (slightly less Gollum-like) and down a dirt drainage, where I encountered some train tracks. I hopped over those and climbed a small hill, where I sat overlooking the beach. If I had better shoes, I could have climbed down to the water, but the view was exactly what I was hoping for, so I sat down for a while.

The sun, which was still an hour from setting, painted an Impressionist column of pale light across the water, reaching all the way to the sand. I squinted at it and tried to quiet my mind. Below me, I saw a small break where surfers were suspended in the water, waiting for tempting waves to arrive. As I watched, a few swam toward the shore, hopping on their boards as they were lifted by the cresting white of the tide, riding at a crouch, and then standing, before finally dropping off just before they met the land. They made it look so easy. Casual. Effortless. A few more surfers who had been stretching on the beach grabbed their boards and ran out into the water to take their turns.

I remembered a friend who broke her arm the first time she tried surfing. And she is a bit of an athletic badass, so I know that surfing must be hard. As I watched, I thought, “Why is that the thing that impresses me the most? Is it so important that things look easy? Why don’t I want anyone to see me struggle—even when what I am doing is legitimately hard? Even if I’m pretty sure no one is watching?”

Maybe it stuck with me because I am nearly forty-eight and starting over in a new career. There are things I don’t like about my current job. For instance, I don’t feel that I contribute much. That is what I am looking for in a career in mental health. But I like feeling that I know what I’m doing. I don’t wobble on my current board—I’ve got muscle memory and a salary and two and a half decades of know-how. But now I’m trying to become something new, something difficult. I’m trying to be a middle-aged rookie. And it’s scary. And humbling. And weirdly hopeful. I don’t want people to see me struggle. Maybe because if they do, I’ll have to admit that I don’t know if I’ll land the wave. And people will be watching. My clients will be watching. But that is the point of the internship. It’s my chance to work out how to do this with supervision and guidance. The only one who is asking myself to do it easily, even gracefully, the first try, is me.

I have been home from San Diego for a week now, and I believe I have resolved the internship debacle. I am proud of myself for managing that unexpected complication and grateful to be back on track. I’m still nervous about my internship and feeling guilty for working on this career change behind the backs of my colleagues, who are wonderful and generous people who deserve my full attention. I’m just hoping that I can do both jobs well-ish for the school year and learn a lot while I gradually become more confident that I can make this transition work. I’m sure I will wobble and that my hips will show their age, but hopefully I won’t wipe out completely.

But then again, if I do, I will learn something from that, too. And anyway, I can always ask ChatGPT what to do next.